Category: Digital Marketing Resources

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an incredibly effective marketing tactic that can provide great returns if executed correctly. However, SEO is often perceived as a silver bullet for business owners looking to drive traffic to their website and increase sales.

While SEO will do both of these things, it is much more effective when combined with a complete online marketing strategy, because the purpose of SEO is to drive quality traffic to a website.

SEO isn’t responsible for converting traffic into customers, and it isn’t responsible for encouraging repeat purchases. Yet, with complementary strategies in place to achieve these goals, the value of a new lead generated through SEO can be increased significantly.

Let’s explore this further.

The Foundation of a Conversion

SEO success is ultimately determined by conversions, and the foundation of a conversion is a great website that is professionally designed to engage visitors and convert them into a lead or sale, depending on the objective. If you execute your SEO strategy perfectly, but send traffic to a website that fails to convert the traffic it receives, much of that effort will go to waste.

Many businesses invest heavily in SEO but fail to invest in their website because they don’t understand the difference between traffic and conversions. Increased traffic is worthless without conversions. New customer acquisition relies on a combination of SEO and an industry-leading website.

The Value of Your Customer

If you’ve invested in both a great SEO campaign and a professional website that is highly effective in converting visitors into customers, you’re two-thirds of the way there. Now it’s time to retain those customers and incentivize them to make additional purchases or invest in your ongoing services.

Many businesses value a customer based on their initial purchase, but a customer should really be valued based on their potential for future purchases, or their lifetime value. There are a few different ways to determine a customer’s lifetime value. So, let’s keep it simple for the purpose of this example.

If a business makes an average profit on a widget of $100, and on average, a customer purchases one widget per month for twelve months, then the true value of that customer is $1,200. So, in this example, every new customer the SEO campaign delivers is potentially worth $1,200, or 12 times more than their initial purchase. So how will this business encourage the customer to make those 11 additional purchases with them, rather than with a competitor?

Encourage Repeat Purchases

Social media and email marketing are excellent tools for encouraging repeat purchases. Having a strategy in place for acquiring your customers’ email addresses and incentivizing them to find you on social media is key and will amplify the overall effectiveness of your SEO campaign.

The customer in the previous example isn’t planning to buy another widget for a few weeks, but it just so happens that the business in this example is having a sale that’s too good for them to pass up and is leveraging email marketing to promote the sale. During their initial purchase, this business was savvy enough to incentivize the customer to subscribe to their email list in return for receiving 10 percent off their next purchase.

The result? This business verifies that their email marketing strategy is increasing customer participation and encouraging customers to make a repeat purchase. As a result, the business doubles the value of any customer who engages with the sale being promoted through the email marketing campaign.

Lead Nurturing

In addition to encouraging repeat purchases, social and email marketing are also very effective at nurturing leads that an SEO campaign delivers, but may not have converted on the first visit. When prospective customers are still in the research phase, it’s important to stay in touch with them, so that your business is top of mind when they finally do decide to move forward.

Again, this increases the overall effectiveness of SEO by converting a lead in the future that may otherwise have been lost.

Conclusion

By combining SEO with a great website and effective social and email marketing, your business will benefit from a complete online marketing strategy that drives traffic and leads to increased conversions. By embracing this holistic approach to online marketing, you can significantly improve the value of both new leads and new customers, thus resulting in a better overall return on your investment.

SEO is a powerful tool for improving your brand’s visibility online, but you can’t rely solely on SEO if you want to dominate your competition. At Leverage Digital, our team considers your specific needs and objectives to develop a digital marketing campaign that helps your brand grow and flourish. Every brand is unique, and your marketing efforts should reflect that.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

Whenever the digital marketing industry catches wind of a Google algorithm update, it becomes a major topic of discussion. Articles are inevitably published on the specifics of the latest update and how to recover lost rankings if your site is penalized. With the exception of historic changes to Google’s algorithm, such as the Panda and Penguin updates that fundamentally changed the way website publishers approached their optimization strategies, algorithm updates should not receive nearly as much attention as they currently do.

Google Algorithm Updates Are Constant

Google updates its algorithm constantly. According to Moz, Google changes its algorithm 500 to 600 times per year. However, we only know about the updates that Google wants us to know about. Why? So, we can help Google serve superior search results to their users. Essentially, Google’s algorithm updates remind us to constantly improve our websites. In return, we are rewarded with better rankings and increased traffic. By improving your website, you’re making Google Search better, which is good for both Google’s bottom line and yours.

Google’s Objectives Are Not Rocket Science

Google’s primary objective is to make money. Google’s core business is advertising, and Google wants people to use its search engine in order to sell advertising via pay-per-click (PPC) ads. In order to sell PPC ads, Google must generate traffic, and a lot of it. Google knows people are more inclined to use a search engine that provides them with higher quality search results. Thus, providing high-quality search results ensures Google generates enough traffic to sell PPC ads.

Why Is This Important?

Understanding Google’s objectives makes having a successful long-term SEO strategy much easier to obtain. You can spend a lot of time analyzing Google’s algorithm updates and attempt to outsmart them, which will inevitably fail, or you can implement a strategy that helps Google achieve its primary objective — providing users with high-quality search results that help it sell PPC ads.

Focus On The User And All Else Will Follow

Google has a list of “10 things we know to be true” within the Company Overview section of its website. The first item on this list says, “Focus on the user, and all else will follow.” Google’s search engine certainly incorporates this philosophy, and when it comes to your website, the same is true. Focus on providing your target audience with the content and experience they expect from your website, and all else (i.e., rankings, traffic, and conversions) will follow.

Conclusion

This is not to say you should completely ignore Google algorithm updates when they’re announced. It simply means as long as your SEO strategy is in line with Google’s objectives, and focuses on providing users with great content and a positive user-experience, algorithm changes should not be a concern.

It’s impossible to control everything that happens online. Fortunately, when you partner with a talented digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital, your business will be future-proofed for an increasingly digital world. We’ll drive traffic to your website, improve your online rankings, and help your brand reach more customers so you can focus on what matters most — supplying your customers with a first-class experience that outshines your competitors.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

Google is done playing games when it comes to online security. The internet is often compared to the Wild West because it seems like there are no rules or limitations keeping it under control, but that is quickly changing.

The good: improved security means more trust. When people don’t have to worry about their passwords being compromised or their personal information falling into the hands of fake collections agencies, they’re more likely to utilize the internet as a customer.

The bad: if your website isn’t currently utilizing an SSL certificate, your rankings have already dropped and you run the risk of being labeled an untrusted website.

The ugly: purchasing an SSL certificate is more confusing than it should be, and if you try to fix the problem yourself, you could find yourself falling into a false sense of security with an SSL certificate that doesn’t meet your website’s standards.

How familiar are you with SSL certificates? If your answer is not very, don’t worry; you’re not alone. We’ve compiled the five most important questions about SSL certificates for the uninitiated.

What Is An SSL Certificate?

An SSL certificate is a small piece of code that can be installed on your web server to improve the security of your website and protect online communications. When a web browser connects a user with your secured website, the SSL certificate encrypts the connection to ensure that personal information is safe. You can tell if a website has an SSL certificate by determining whether or not it has “https://” before the URL. If it does, the site is safe for browsing. On the contrary, “http://” websites are not secured with an SSL certificate which means users’ information is not necessarily protected.

An SSL certificate ensures that malicious users can’t gain access to your information or usage data. It’s like sealing a letter in an envelope before mailing it; you’re submitting information into an external system, but it’s protected from other entities in that system.

Why Are SSL Certificates Important?

SSL certificates are important because the information you send on the Internet travels from computer to computer until it reaches the destination server. Without the encryption provided by an SSL certificate, any computer between you and the server can access your credit card numbers, usernames and passwords, and other types of sensitive information. When your business welcomes customers to your site without an SSL certificate, your customers can be exploited for valuable information. With a new wave of data protection policies on the horizon, ensuring that your website protects your customers is imperative. An SSL certificate will ensure that you serve customers effectively while minimizing the possibility of litigation.

When Did SSL Certificates Become Important?

SSL Certificates have always played an important role in providing users with a secure connection, especially for e-commerce; however, they have recently started to play a larger role in SEO rankings and paid advertisements in Google. Websites that do not possess a valid SSL certificate are being flagged as “not secure” by the search engine giant. This warning can derail your business by effectively  terminating web traffic. The average user isn’t going to trust a website that is labeled a security threat by Google, which means all of the progress your business has made from SEO and other online marketing strategies will be rendered inconsequential. Therefore, if your website does not currently possess an SSL certificate, it’s integral that you contact a digital marketing agency to help you sift through the SSL marketplace to find the certificate that is right for your business.

How Do SSL Certificates Affect My Website?

Having an SSL certificate can have an effect on search engine results page (SERP) rankings, visibility, and perception among customers. In 2014, Google announced that having a secure site would be an important factor when ranking websites. While studies vary in terms of how significantly this factors into ranking, our agency’s internal studies have noted a positive increase in rankings among sites that have been converted to https://.

Previously, Google has stated that in instances where there are two sites of identical value, they will give preference to the site with an SSL certificate. This is evident in a recent report from Moz that states that 40% of Google’s first page organic search results are from https:// sites.In terms of customer perception, a report from GlobalSign states that 84 percent of consumers would end a purchase if the site was not secured.

The lack of an SSL certificate will now be more visible than ever. In addition to Google’s “not secure” warning , their browser, Chrome, has started using an exclamation mark in the address bar to alert users that they are on a site that isn’t secure.

How Much Do SSL Certificates Cost?

The value of SSL certificates is undeniable, but figuring out the most cost-effective and secure option can put your business at odds with itself. SSL certificates range in value from free to hundreds of dollars. However, not all SSL certificates are built the same, and depending on the size and type of business you oversee, your SSL needs will vary.

You might be inclined to perform a quick Google search to weigh your options, but shopping for SSL certificates isn’t like shopping for televisions. Investing in the wrong SSL certificate could have extensive legal and financial ramifications later on. Free SSL certificates, like those offered by Let’s Encrypt, are an effective stopgap solution while considering your options. However, if you want to eliminate worry and ensure that your website maintains its current rankings, you should invest in a paid certificate that offers liability protection, multi-domain certification, superior server compatibility, and more.

Are you working with an award-winning digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital to ensure that your site is secure for your business and your customers? SSL certificates are here to stay, and without one, your business risks losing out against your competitors. Online security is critical to the success of your business, so don’t let your website get flagged for lacking adequate security measures. Contact our agency today to find out how you can get the right SSL certificate for your business today!

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

Typically, dominating your niche on Google yields extremely profitable results. This is not only because ranking well for keywords related to a specific niche helps drive higher quality traffic to your site, but also because it differentiates your brand.

Follow these five steps to dominate your niche on Google.

Determine Your Niche

If you haven’t already, the first step to dominating your niche on Google is determining what it is. The more specific your niche is, the better.

Your business may offer many different products or services, but what is the one product or service your business is known for, or you would like to be known for? That is the niche you should choose to dominate on Google.

Depending on your competition and resources, it can be very difficult and sometimes impossible to dominate multiple niches on Google. So, it usually makes sense to focus on one niche.

Let’s take for example, a law firm that specializes in personal injury law, but also practices criminal and family law. Ideally, this law firm would love to dominate Google for all three areas of practice. However, unless they’re willing to invest the necessary resources into developing three separate websites and managing three separate SEO campaigns, this would be very difficult to achieve. Because the firm in this example has limited resources (as any business does), they would have a much greater chance of achieving success by focusing optimization efforts on personal injury law, since that is their specialty.

Why is this? Well, for starters, Google wants to provide users with information that is highly relevant to their needs. When someone is searching for a personal injury lawyer, that is exactly what they want to find. A user will not respond favorably if their search for personal injury lawyers provides results for criminal and family lawyers who also practice personal injury law, because those results are not as relevant to the user’s immediate needs.

Optimize with Niche Specific Keywords

Once you’ve decided on the niche you want to dominate, you must choose the right keywords.

Determining the right keywords to optimize for is crucial. It requires a thorough understanding of your target audience, as well as the keywords they use when searching for your product or service. It also requires specificity. You can’t dominate a niche by going after generic keywords.

Optimizing for keywords specific to your niche has multiple benefits. These keywords will be less competitive, and therefore rank more easily. They will also deliver traffic to your site that is more likely to convert.

Going back to the previous example, the person who searches the keyword phrase, “lawyer + location” is far less likely to convert than the person who searches the keyword phrase, “personal injury lawyer motorcycle accident + location.” The latter search query is indicative of someone who knows exactly what they’re looking for. When that person finds a personal injury lawyer who specializes in motorcycle accident cases in their area, that lawyer will have a great chance of converting them into a new client.

Implement Google Authorship

Implementing Google Authorship will enable your face and name to appear next to your website in the search results. This not only allows users to associate a face with your organization, but also promotes your personal brand by allowing you to appear as an authority within your niche. This is especially powerful for medical professionals, legal professionals, and consultants, where your personal brand is strongly tied to your organization’s brand.

In addition to helping establish trust and credibility with your target audience, Google Authorship may influence rankings now and in the future. Though the specifics have been debated, we do know that Google Authorship can have a positive impact on click-through rates (CTR), because Authorship increases a site’s visibility in the search results. Just make sure to use a professional photo that will be well received by your target audience.

Write Great, Authoritative Content Often

The next step is to write great, authoritative content often, on topics that are relevant to your niche. Writing great, authoritative content serves three purposes.

1. It shows that you’re an expert and a thought leader in your niche.

2. Acts as a resource for potential customers, and gives them a reason to come back to your site.

3. Provides Google with more quality content to index, which can have a positive impact on rankings.

However, when writing this content, be sure to write it for your target audience, and not for Google. You can still incorporate keywords into the content, but just make sure it sounds natural, and reads well.

Conclusion

It requires a lot of time and effort to dominate your niche on Google, but if you do, you will find that your business outshines your competition online and in-person.

With a superior website, comprehensive digital marketing strategy, and a dedicated team like Leverage Digital backing your every move, you can finally achieve the success you have been waiting for. Once you have the power to dominate your niche on Google, your business will be equipped with an extremely effective tool for taking usurping your industry’s throne. Are you ready to become an industry leader?

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

If you want your business to remain in the world of the living, you can’t be afraid to partner with a fearless digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital. We’ll equip you with all the weapons you need to prevent your brand from walking among the undead. When you waste your money on outdated marketing and advertising, your business can become possessed by a spirit that doesn’t fit your brand. Now, that’s scary.

Halloween is approaching and the malevolent ghosts of dead brands are playing tricks on businesses. Not all marketing strategies are effective; there are tricks and there are treats. If your business wants to avoid mummified web design and zombified content marketing that fails to log conversions, you need to be able to tell the difference between obsolete marketing tricks and innovative marketing treats.

Branding – Treat

Halloween is just like any other day of the year if you don’t dress up in a costume, and your business will be just like any other business if you don’t develop a strong brand. If you go door to door without a costume, nobody will be encouraged to give you candy. The same is true for your business; without a strong brand woven into every aspect of your business, customers won’t feel particularly motivated to purchase your products or services.

Branding is a powerful tool. Just look at iconic companies like Coca-Cola, Ford, and John Deere; they all possess instantly recognizable brands that help them connect with customers and drive revenue. When you develop a trusted brand, you’ll never have to worry about scaring away customers.

Billboards – Trick

Some agencies are trying to resurrect billboards as an effective advertising platform. Unfortunately, their attempts to give life to this outdated, virtually extinct form of advertising has lead to inept billboards that lack the ability to track conversions, views, and engagement. Billboards are like Frankenstein, they’re large and imposing, but they can’t clearly communicate your brand’s message and are an eyesore for locals. Billboards are best left resting in peace on the side of the highway.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Treat

SEO is the backbone of digital marketing, so if your business is lacking a strong SEO strategy, the result could be spine-tingling. Maintaining a high ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) helps your business boost traffic to its website and prevents you from joining the vampires on pages 3 and 4 who rarely see the light of day. In order for your SEO strategy to deliver the results you desire, you need to make a strong commitment and remain patient. Organic results take time, but once you’ve established yourself as a page one resident, your business won’t need to fear returning to the land of the dead.

Direct Marketing – Trick

If your business sells physical products, but you don’t have the capital or reputation to procure shelf space in retail stores, you can partner with a direct marketing agency to have your products sold in stores like Costco and Sam’s Club. Unfortunately, direct marketers require your business to supply promotional materials like cutouts, signs, and pamphlets to garnish tables staffed by underpaid college graduates who earn commission or hourly exclusively depending on their sales numbers.

Direct marketers often resemble zombies as they pursue customers around stores with arms outstretched, one hand clutching a hair dryer designed by Kim Kardashian’s stylist and in the other, an activated charcoal face cream promoted by Beyonce. They can be overly persistent, which means driving customers away from your brand is just as easy as driving them to it. Direct marketing might help you sell off some stock in the short term, but the damage to your branding will haunt you forever.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – Treat

If you’re already running a successful SEO campaign, you can boost its efficacy by implementing a PPC campaign, too. In addition to getting listed twice on SERPs, you increase click-throughs to your site and the probability of conversion. It’s easy to get spooked when you invest in a multi-tiered strategy that combines SEO and PPC, but this potent combination works together like garlic and silver bullets to keep your business safe from the marketing monsters.

Television Commercials – Trick

Commercials crawl out of your customers’ televisions to scare away their program for an extra thirty seconds, so it comes as no surprise that people aren’t particularly fond of them. Today, cable television is merely a skeleton of what it once was and the prevalence of streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime have led to an influx of “cord cutting,” or canceling cable subscriptions.

Cable service providers are losing hundreds of thousands of subscribers every year and streaming services are the ones digging their graves. Insights from Nielsen can give you a small-picture perspective of the success of your commercial, but television is outclassed in nearly every way by digital marketing. If you are still interested in representing your brand with video, you can shoot trendy video content on a budget without investing in a full-fledged commercial.

When you partner with an award-winning digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital, you can rest easy knowing that your business is supported with valiant branding that helps you survive the zombie marketing apocalypse. Stay away from ill-conceived marketing strategies that leave your business dead in the water and embrace innovative marketing solutions that keep your brand shining.

Running a business is scary. With competition at all-time highs, there’s never been a more vital time to differentiate your brand from the competition. By outfitting your brand with a customized digital marketing strategy from Leverage Digital, you can outclass your competition on every front and grow your business. Our agency busts the bad marketing ghosts and focuses on strategies that help your business succeed in the world of the living.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

If your business lacks a strong online presence, you’ll be hard-pressed to survive in our increasingly digital world. Without a dedicated website, immersive social media content, and a strong SEO strategy, potential customers will never connect with your business. To remain relevant, you need to invest in a digital imprint that packages the real-world experience of interacting with your business and delivers it to digital displays of all shapes and sizes.

Whether you already have a website or want to invest in an original build-out, it’s imperative that you understand the importance of optimization. With a skilled web developer assisting you, you can create a website that is optimized for both desktops and mobile, but if you’re just starting out, your site’s initial design and functionality will depend on whether you want to prime your digital imprint for desktop or mobile.

The Case for Desktop Optimization

By optimizing your site for desktop, you give your business the opportunity to represent itself with an industry-leading website customized to your precise specifications. With a talented backend developer working behind the scenes, the only limit to your website is your imagination. Unfortunately, the more resources you pour into desktop optimization, the harder it will be to reformat your site for mobile. It’s up to you to decide which type of device will be used to view your website more often: desktop or mobile.

The Case for Mobile Optimization

On the other hand, mobile optimization utilizes a much smaller toolset to create a website that looks as good as it functions on mobile. Ideally, mobile sites are simple, easy to navigate, and built on the Bootstrap framework. 95 percent of Americans have access to a mobile phone, but only 75 percent of Americans have access to a computer. And although the price of smartphones and computers has decreased steadily over the last decade, smartphones are still significantly less expensive. It’s also worth noting that most households contain only one or two computers, but may contain one or more phones per family member. Since more people are accessing the internet from mobile phones, priming your digital imprint for mobile allows you to reach more customers.

Our Recommendation

Although working with an award-winning digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital means you don’t necessarily have to choose one over the other, if you are working on a strict budget, we recommend optimizing your site for mobile first. 57 percent of all internet traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. If you aren’t focusing on engaging mobile users, you could be losing out on 57 percent of your potential chances to convert customers. A website optimized for mobile can still look gorgeous on 5K displays, but it will be inherently less interactive than sites designed specifically for desktop users. Still, with more users embracing mobile technology than ever before, mobile optimization is a safer, more cost-effective solution to your website woes.

How does your business stack up against the competition online? Every year, the amount of business conducted online increases. If you want to dominate your competition, you need powerful branding backed by quantifiable data. It all starts with a website optimized for your brand’s success. At Leverage Digital, our team can provide you with a website that outshines your competition on desktop and mobile.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

The quality of your website can have a major impact on the overall success of your SEO campaign. There are two major reasons for this:

First, popular search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo want to ensure their users are having a positive experience when utilizing their powerful search tools. To accomplish this goal, the top search results must include websites that not only contain information relevant to the user’s search query, but also provide the user with an engaging experience once on the site.

Second, websites must be able to convert visitors into leads and sales. A high quality, professionally designed website has a better chance of converting visitors into leads and sales than a poorly designed site with subpar functionality. Locking down first page rankings will be fruitless if your site turns off prospective customers.

How does your website stack up against your competition? Have your customers lauded their experience on your site? Do you feel like your online presence accurately represents the quality and success of your brand? Ensuring that your website provides your customers with a positive user experience will help you convert traffic from SEO and boost profitability; after all, business is going digital, and your website is your new storefront.

Invest in Professional Design

Having an attractive and professional design is one of the best ways to help your website stand out from your competition.

Captivating designs impress and engage users to increase the amount of time they spend interacting with your site. On the other hand, unappealing designs repel users with frustrating, nonsensical navigation and poorly optimized visuals. These issues commonly contribute to high bounce rates and a significant reduction in the time spent on your site. Over time, search engines will begin to perceive these negative signals as a result of a substandard user experience and reduce your site’s search rankings accordingly.

Additionally, people have powerful reactions to visuals and make strong, sometimes permanent, judgments based on first impressions. For this reason, you can expect lower search engine rankings and stifled conversion rates when supporting your brand online with an inferior website. If your website is unattractive or outdated, our agency can help you preserve the success of your SEO campaign while implementing a 360-degree site redesign.

Create Engaging Content

In order to provide users with a positive experience, your site must contain well-written content that meets the needs of your target audience. Users will succumb to frustration and leave your site if your content is irrelevant to their needs or poorly written.

Conversely, users will stay on your site longer, come back more often, and even share your content if it meets their expectations and is deftly written. So, focus on writing content for your target audience, not for search engines.

When you provide users with engaging content, not only will your site receive superior rankings, but the probability of users converting into customers will also increase.

Provide User-Friendly Navigation

Once a user finds your site, is impressed with its design, and engages with your content, the goal is to keep them on your site as long as possible since the more a user engages with your site, the more likely they are to convert into a lead or sale.

Providing users with a navigation structure that makes it easy for them to find additional relevant information is a key element of keeping users engaged. If users find it difficult to locate relevant content because your site’s navigation isn’t intuitive, they will likely give up, and move on to the next site. User-friendly navigation helps you procure “clicks” on your site. By making it simple for users to navigate to another page one or more times within your website, you reduce your bounce rate and provide your SEO campaign with a nudge in the right direction.

Ensure Fast Page Load Speeds

Have you ever clicked on a search result in Google only to find yourself staring at a blank white screen for what feels like an eternity? Did you wait for it to finish loading, or did you get frustrated and move on?

When it comes to your website, no matter how great the design or how engaging the content, slow page load speeds will drag your user-experience through the dirt. Both your rankings and conversion rates will suffer as a result of stunted load speeds.

The importance of investing in a quality hosting solution that provides fast page load speeds is often ignored. Cheap hosting can cost you in the form of suppressed rankings and a decrease in new customers, so a quality hosting solution is well worth the investment.

Conclusion

Effectively applying your business model to a digital framework is key to surviving in today’s digital economy. If a century-old company like Sears can file for bankruptcy as a direct result of competition from online retailers like Amazon, just imagine the effect on small businesses.

With a professional design, engaging content, user-friendly navigation, and fast page load speeds, your business can outshine your competition in the increasingly valuable digital space. Not only will these factors contribute to improved rankings, but they will also lead to higher conversion rates and ultimately more customers.

At Leverage Digital, we help you dominate your brand’s corner of the internet with responsive digital design that outclasses your competition, compelling content that drives SEO and user engagement, and industry-leading web support to ensure that your brand is always growing, day or night. Our holistic approach to marketing allows us to customize a superior marketing plan that helps you reach your objectives while building a solid foundation to drive your brand’s growth into the future.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

Most SEO campaigns are destined for failure because expectations are too high, budgets are too low, decisions are made based on assumptions instead of data, and customer expectations are misunderstood.

Whether you’re managing a campaign yourself, hiring a so-called ‘SEO professional’, or partnering with an award-winning digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital, you should ask yourself these seven questions to determine if your campaign is on the right track to help your business build momentum for sustained growth in the future.

1. Have You Set Realistic Goals?

Setting unrealistic goals for your SEO campaign, such as dominating Google and Bing for every product or service you offer right out of the gate, will almost always result in failure. Instead, set realistic objectives for your campaign and achieve success incrementally.

For example, most businesses offer multiple products or services. If your business falls into this category, it can be daunting to achieve top rankings for everything you offer. With an incremental strategy, you can optimize for one of your top-selling products or services, and after you’ve achieved success, move onto the next product or service and so on.

Also, keep in mind that a successful SEO strategy can be perceived as unsuccessful based solely on unrealistic goals. This is why partnering with a talented digital marketing agency is vital to the success of your SEO strategy. Without knowledgeable guidance and consistent performance audits, it’s nearly impossible to track the metrics of your brand’s success.

2. Do You Have a Practical Timeframe and Budget?

This is a big one. Most businesses do not have practical timeframes or budgets for their SEO campaigns. They want results immediately, but at the same time, are only willing to make a minimal investment. By consulting with our digital marketing agency, you can determine what a realistic timeframe and budget entail for your business.

The more competitive your industry, the greater the timeframe and larger the budget you should expect. If you go into an SEO campaign with a short timeframe and an unwillingness to make the necessary investment, it will most likely fail because you are not affording your marketing partner the necessary time to test your strategy and make the adjustments needed for a successful long-term campaign.

3. Have You Chosen the Right Keywords?

Optimizing for the wrong keywords is common and often the cause of an SEO campaign‘s failure. Ideally, you’ve hired an agency or professional to manage your campaign and selected the right keywords after performing extensive keyword research. However, if you’ve selected your own keywords based on what you “think” your customers are searching without verifying the results with real data, it’s highly improbable that your campaign is using the right keywords.

If you want to ensure that you’re optimizing for the right keywords, analyze keyword data using a reputable research tool to see what keywords your (successful) competitors are using.

4. Is Your Campaign Delivering the Right Traffic?

If you have failed to select the right keywords, then you’re either not delivering enough traffic to your site, not delivering the right traffic, or a combination of both. A quick sniff test to determine if your campaign is delivering the right traffic is to look at your site’s bounce rate for organic search traffic. If you see a high bounce rate for organic search visitors, then what they’re searching for is not consistent with what they’re finding on your website. It’s important to distinguish the bounce rate for organic visitors from other visitor types (i.e., direct visits, referral visits, etc.) so you can make informed decisions based on your organic search traffic specifically. If you have a high bounce rate for all visitor types, you may have a larger issue to address, such as the design or functionality of your website.

5. Do You Have a Professional Website?

A successful SEO campaign starts with a professional website that engages visitors upon arrival. Visitor engagement is crucial to an effective SEO campaign because engagement ultimately results in conversions, which is how most businesses measure a campaign’s success. The lack of a professional website discredits your brand, therefore reducing engagement and conversions.

Here are some questions to ask when evaluating your website:

6. Are You Writing Content That Your Customers Care About?

A dearth of visitor engagement and the resulting lack of conversions can also be attributed to publishing content that fails to answer prospective customers’ questions. Do not write content simply to appeal to search engines. Have a content strategy in place that answers questions and addresses concerns your customers typically have. Prospective customers will appreciate the extra effort, and they are much more likely to become paying customers as a result.

7. Are You Tracking Data and Making Improvements?

Tracking data and making improvements as needed is crucial to a successful long-term SEO strategy. This can often result in small tweaks that help improve the campaign over time or significant adjustments such as revamping an entire content strategy, or even redesigning a website.

It’s a mistake to simply measure the results of an SEO strategy based on one data point, such as rankings or phone calls. You should look at all of the data collectively to develop a better understanding of how your rankings are contributing to traffic and how that traffic is contributing to conversions. If you look at all of the data points as a system working together, it’s easier to find and fix deficiencies. For example, if rankings and traffic are good, but conversions are lacking, this could be due to poor keyword choices, a poorly designed website, or some other factor that could change the entire nature of the campaign if addressed.

Conclusion

Most SEO campaigns are destined for failure, but yours doesn’t have to be. If you answered “no” to any of these questions, you now know where your campaign is lacking and where to focus on making changes. We can help you make those changes.

At Leverage Digital, we help you dominate your brand’s corner of the internet with responsive digital design that outclasses your competition, compelling content that drives SEO and user engagement, and industry-leading web support to ensure that your brand is always growing, day or night. Our holistic approach to marketing allows us to customize a superior marketing plan that helps you reach your objectives while building a solid foundation to drive your brand’s growth into the future.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

When you browse the internet and visit the websites of corporate behemoths like Amazon, Walmart, and Toyota, you’ll rarely find yourself wishing the user experience was more streamlined or more fully featured.

Clearly, these companies have invested heavily in competitive, industry-leading websites, which is why search bars find what you’re looking for, carts populate when you add items to them, and checkout procedures are quick, simple, and easy.

This is because successful brands understand that in today’s economy, the internet can either be the birthplace or graveyard of a business depending on how much time and effort they afford to optimizing their digital imprint.

Fortunately, by partnering with an award-winning digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital, you can achieve comparable results even if your business isn’t pulling in billions of dollars in revenue annually.

On the surface, developing your brand’s online presence helps your business reach more potential customers, but the significance of representing your brand online goes much deeper than that. Online optimization isn’t a luxury, it’s an expectation, and if your brand fails to commit resources to stake your claim in the digital space, you’ll fall by the wayside faster than a McDonald’s representative at an organic food convention.

Establishing your brand online requires an ardent commitment to full stack web development. Even the prettiest websites will be shunned if they lack functionality; and likewise, a fully optimized website will never get the chance to prove its worth if its homepage looks like it was designed on the Windows ‘98 version of Microsoft Word.

As more and more business is conducted online, your website will essentially become a global point of sales system where you can procure new business 24/7. Unfortunately, malicious entities maraud the internet for opportunities to create chaos. When your payment processor suddenly disconnects from your bank account, or Google starts flagging your site as “not secure” because you lack an SSL certificate, having dedicated web developers on your side can prevent you from losing out on thousands of dollars or more in potential business opportunities.

When you partner with a digital marketing agency to grow your brand, ensure that their team contains web developers specializing in front-end and back-end development. In order to bridge the gap between user and user experience, you need to ensure that the aesthetics of your web pages are backed by stringent coding that improves responsiveness and optimizes your site for mobile.

Developing your brand’s website requires an equal commitment to style and substance. Regrettably, most advertising and marketing agencies are focused solely on presenting their clients with attractive deliverables; but that’s only half of the job. You wouldn’t purchase the newest iPhone with the oldest iOS, so why would you invest in digital solutions that fail to improve the user experience on an aesthetic and functional level?

Without inspired design, responsive functionality, and a watchdog mentality ensuring that your server and database are healthy and happy, your website will never reach its potential. In fact, without a skilled web developer maintaining the technology that powers the components of your website, it’s impossible for your website to exist at all. And as you’re probably aware — if you’re not online, you’re not in business.

Leverage Digital was established in 2008 to help businesses transition from humble, brick-and-mortar beginnings into digital-savvy industry leaders. Today, our clients benefit from award-winning web design and industry-leading web support that outclasses the competition; all wrapped up in a multifaceted digital marketing strategy customized specifically for your needs. If you’re noticing a dip in revenue because your website is underperforming, our team can help you get back on the right track so you can dominate your competition.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

With over 1 billion users actively snapping and uploading photos every day, there has never been a better time to take advantage of what is quite possibly the most powerful social media marketing platform in the world: Instagram.

Before your business can start generating leads and converting new customers using Instagram, you will first need to spend some time getting used to this intuitive visual platform. The best way to gain a fundamental understanding of how Instagram works is to dive in head first and start posting.

These 10 photo challenges are perfect for Instagram novices who want to start posting relevant content that engages users, gain a better understanding of how hashtags work, and break into Instagram’s coveted discovery feed.

1. 52 Photos, 52 Weeks

The first rule of Instagram: post consistently. You don’t need to start posting daily from the jump, but a modest goal, like one photo a week, is an effective way to incorporate Instagram into your marketing stack. By posting once a week, you can engage established clients and customers while maintaining a small degree of visibility with fringe customers.

#52photos52weeks #weeklypost #weekinreview

2. Wellness Wednesday

Everyone knows that Instagram users are fixated on health and wellness. This fixation even lead to a brand new career field: fitspo models (essentially fitness influencers). Showcase your brand’s dedication to health and wellness by posting photos of your team enjoying the outdoors, eating a healthy meal together, or exercising. This is a great way to drive casual engagement with users. These types of interactions typically lead to continued engagement over time.

#wellnesswednesday #workoutwednesday #healthyeating

3. Throwback Thursday

Quite possibly the most popular Instagram challenge, Throwback Thursday inspires users to post a photo from the past. Funny baby photos, awkward high school pics, or photos of your business from long ago make for compelling content that cultivates likes and makes it easier for users to connect with your brand.

#tbt #throwbackthursday #lookingback

4. Friday Funday

After a long week of working (and hopefully posting on Instagram), it’s always a good idea to unwind with a simple photo challenge like Friday Funday. This challenge is self-explanatory; post a picture of your business having fun. By utilizing a call to action or positing a question to your target audience, you can organically generate comments and likes.

#fridayfunday #funfriday #justforfun

5. Lunch Break

Instagram is the king of foodie photography. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an account without a single picture of food. Our fascination with pictures of food is logical — food is typically bright, photogenic, and easily staged — and the fact that we eat lunch every day means we’re afforded the opportunity to post every day. Photos of lunch allow you to spotlight your team when they’re not working, which helps you connect with your target audience and break bread digitally.

#lunchbreak #lunchstagram #foodieblog

6. Jumpstagram

Do you remember the ending of every 80s and 90s movie ever? Typically, the conflict is resolved and then something magical happens: all of the protagonists jump skyward as the shot freezes mid-air and the credits roll. The Jumpstagram challenge tasks you with recreating this type of iconic image. The benefit of this challenge is twofold. First, it shows your target audience that the members of your team are close, which inspires confidence in your business. Second, it’s a fun activity to break up the monotony of the day.

#jumpstagram #jump #photofinish

7. Pet Portrait

Pets are universally loved by Instagram users. Incorporating your furry friends into a content-lite post helps to humanize your staff and engage your target audience. Interacting with pets makes people happy even if that interaction takes place from the other side of a mobile display. Pet lovers have a tendency to vocalize their love for animals on social media, so pet-related posts commonly result in comments, likes, and shares. Dogs are the most popular pets on the internet, but cats, lizards, birds, and fish are all capable of helping you engage with your target audience.

#petportrait #animalsatwork #petstagram

8. Love What You Do

Prospective customers are more likely to utilize the products and services of a company that truly loves what they do. Why? When you love what you do, you’re more likely to deliver high-quality results and put forth the extra effort necessary to separate yourself from your competition. Posting photos of your team working happily shows that you value a healthy work-life balance and allows your workers to complete tasks diligently without feeling overburdened. Confucius said it best: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

#lovewhatyoudo #worklove #lovemyjob

9. Quotable

You can create fresh content for social media by repurposing new and existing SEO content as a shareable graphic. Quotables, or visual content that focuses on a quote as the focal point of an image, are easy to design and even easier to share. Promote existing content by posting a quotable on Instagram that redirects users to the article hosted on your website. If you put in the effort, you can create a content marketing strategy around existing SEO content.

#quotable #quotes #inspiration

10. Past and Present

How has your business grown over the years? As you evolve from humble beginnings and achieve true success, it’s always a good idea to take a retrospective look at how far your brand has come. This is an effective Instagram challenge for a number of reasons; most notably, it allows you to showcase the growth of your business without coming off as braggadocious and it allows you reconnect with long-time clients who have stuck with you since the beginning. You can utilize Instagram’s photo album feature to provide your target audience with separate images for your past and present challenge on the same post.

#pastandpresent #changes #thankyou

How do your customers view your business? Do they see you like they see any other business? Or do they see beyond your operations and into the heart of your brand? In today’s economy, competition is stiff, so it’s imperative that you find ways to set yourself apart. Humanizing your brand using curated visual content can help you connect with your target audience and convert new customers. Our agency has the tools and expertise to help you develop a customized social media strategy that grows your brand with measurable results.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.